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Ryan’s Plan: To Balance the Budget, Hurt the Poor

By David Firestone April 4, 2014 5:14 pmApril 4, 2014 5:14 pm

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Paul Ryan on March 6, 2014.Credit Mike Theiler/Reuters

The House leadership is trying to muscle Paul Ryan’s 2015 budget plan through the Republican caucus, and the amount of effort required is revealing. The budget is full of breathtakingly unfair spending cuts, but many Republican House members don’t like it because they think it doesn’t go far enough.

Walter Jones of North Carolina said he cannot vote for any budget that contains a dollar of foreign aid. Thomas Massie of Kentucky said the budget doesn’t cut spending nearly fast enough.
“I campaigned on needing to balance the budget in the next five years, not 10 years,” Mr. Massie told The Hill. “And I need a budget that makes some serious course corrections in the next year.”

He’s talking about a budget that cuts $5 trillion from spending over the next decade—a ludicrously steep decline but apparently not the cliff-dive Mr. Massie is seeking. And there’s not much doubt about where all that money is coming from. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities did the subtraction this week and determined that 69 percent of the cuts in the Ryan budget come from programs that benefit people with low or moderate incomes.

That includes programs such as Pell grants, which send poor kids to college, and Medicaid, which allows poor people to receive medical care. It even slashes subsidized school lunches.

The budget would also devastate food stamps. A report issued by the CBPP on Friday showed that Mr. Ryan would cut $137 billion from food stamps over the next decade, an 18 percent decline that would terminate benefits for 3.8 million people right away. And if Mr. Ryan’s plan to turn food stamps into a state block grant went into effect, Republican states would cut off millions more people.

These cuts won’t actually happen, fortunately. The Ryan budget, which will probably pass next week (the conservatives won’t really block it), will never be considered by the Senate. It is only getting a vote so that Republicans can say they voted for it.

And that’s the most remarkable thing of all. The Republicans are eager to say that they would take food stamps away from poor people. They’re proud of trying to cut school lunches and Pell grants. If the Democrats can’t get their voters to the polls with that kind of material, they’re not trying hard enough.